Explaining Bill of Materials (BOMs) in the Product Sourcing Functionality

SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite enables you to integrate your Material Master from SAP S/4HANA and load product BOM information into SAP Ariba. After you integrate BOM information into SAP Ariba, you can manage your hierarchical BOMs, materials, ownership, plant, and pricing over time directly on the Product Sourcing dashboard in SAP Ariba Sourcing.

BOMs are formally structured lists of components that make up a product or assembly. The list contains the object number of each component, together with the quantity and unit of measure. Depending on the industry, BOMs may also be referred to as recipes or lists of ingredients. BOMs contain important basic data for numerous areas of a company, for example:

• Material requirements planning (MRP)
• Material provisions for production
• Product costing
• Plant maintenance
• BOM Level
• Vendors who supply the part
• Quantity
• Customer Part ID
• Manufacturer Part ID
• Vendor Part ID

You may wish to limit the design data that you share with your partner or contract manufacturer. For example, if your partner is helping you with a design, you might choose to share just the sub-assembly that relates to their work, protecting the intellectual property associated with the other aspects of the product design. Nesting and creating sub-assemblies within your BOM enables you to isolate specific sub-assemblies.

A multilevel BOM is also helpful when you have complex and highly configurable products. Updating a sub-assembly within a larger product assembly can be done quickly if you have structured your BOM as multi-leveled, because a change order only needs to address a subset of the product. The sub-assembly can be revised and used in multiple higher level assemblies as necessary. The higher level assemblies only need to be revised as far up the product structure tree as form fit function rules dictate.

Buyers with Materials Manager group permission can assign contract manufacturers and programs at any level in a BOM. BOM child levels inherit plant and program values from their parent level, unless values are explicitly assigned at the child level.

In Product Sourcing, the following functionality is available for working with BOMs:

• BOM integration and BOM hierarchical view: After a BOM has been transferred into SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite through an external system integration, an administrator can sign in to SAP Ariba, view the BOM, and verify the information and hierarchy.
• BOM management:
  • Assign BOMs to owners. After a materials manager user assigns an owner, SAP Ariba emails the part owner indicating they have a new part assigned to them.
  • Assign BOMs to programs
  • Activate BOMs
• Ability to change BOMs
• BOM compare
• BOM security: By default, only certain users are able to view the BOM after it has been created. As a result, customer administrator users may assign the users or groups of users that can view the BOM or edit the BOM attributes.
• Additional parts
• BOM search: Materials manager and materials viewer users can search for all the BOMs to which a part belongs.
• BOM status: Materials manager and materials viewer users can filter BOMs based on their status (active or inactive).

By default, SAP Ariba rolls-up cost at the leaf or part level. You can set the costing level for an assembly to Yes, meaning that the price for the assembly is used for the BOM roll-up.

You can view the BOM hierarchy from the quote level and up using the BOM buy view filter. The BOM buy view filter displays the BOM buy view one level at a time and enables buyers to expand the complete BOM view.